Holy Shit. I have died and gone to puppy heaven. But, being told I can openly discuss Lemurs has made me run into the corner afraid…I feel this might be a trap, like being encouraged to “have a chocolate dear” then hearing “NOT THAT ONE!” from a crazed Auntie. I’m not saying that you are crazed Aunts by the way. Its just the open invitation has made me nervous and a bit afraid of my benign overlords.
I’m off to London for the weekend, so please don’t have a “rename your pet in an amusing Dickensian style” post, or I’ll miss it.

Anyway, hey, did you guys know the shiba inu breeders who had the puppy cam last year have another litter? Because I am a complete dork, I have renamed the two cream boys Inu-Yasha and Sesshoumaru in my head.

Kit, the newest orphaned baby otter at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Because they’ve currently no slots left in their rehab/release program, she’ll remain at the Aquarium – they say, it’s the first time they’ve had a kit on display.* And she’s darling.

*I’m not sure if this is strictly true, since I seem to remember kits among the first otters, back when they opened. But then again, my memory may also be faulty.

OMG I love Hipster Puppies. My little dude Oliver is actually wearing a striped polo shirt right now; I may have to pose him with something hipster related and submit his photo. Too bad I don’t have any empty cheap/crappy beer cans… hipsters don’t usually drink microbrews, or do they? All I drink nowadays is Aprikat (http://www.alleykatbeer.com/) and Ice Fog (http://www.yukonbeer.com/).

Oh my God, that reminds me so much of Creature Comforts, which if you haven’t seen it, Nick Park interviewed a whole bunch of unsuspecting people about different subjects and then stuck their voices on different animals. HILARIOUS. It would be more funny if I didn’t actually know people who do all of those things.

I plan to spend a lot of quality time with my dog this weekend. I will get a head start on a Dickensian nickname for him.

Oh man, that’s MY hipster puppy in the purple scarf! Now, see, I know you’re all thinking that I dressed her up that way and posed her next to the Olivetti… wrong! Poor dear dressed *herself* up last week during our Brooklyn snow day, planted herself in front of the typewriter, and wouldn’t leave until she’d banged out a sequel to Ethan Frome (“The Sled Rides Again,” if you must know).

I kid, but Tillie’s very happy to be the center of such attention. YAY!

“Well, now we are, obviously”
Ok Sweetmachine, perhaps my sculpting lemurs in dutch cheese suggestion was a bit Norman Bates on reflection. Perhaps I would have been better off mentioning my “Lemurs love to Learn Tap Dance” DVD. If anyone wants to borrow it, just ask. To be honest, I’ve never watched it from start to finish, but as my lemur is an imaginary one, I can’t tell if he’s learning anything anyway.
Anyway, I’m glad I’ve cleared that up.

I should add, the DVD is also imaginary, so offering to loan it out may have been a bit rash. I should say too, that sometimes Gregory Hines guest stars in it, but only if my imagining powers are fuelled by fizzy drinks and overcoloured sweets.
Shit, I need a break.

Oh, yes an open thread! I had a super happy moment in my European history class. We were discussing Francis I of france and Henry VIII having competitions to see who was more manly and awesome and shit. One kid raised his hand and asked if it was before Henry got fat and my professor said “Oh, no, Henry was very athletic, he wasn’t as fast in a foot race but he was very athletic.” I wanted to jump up and yell, “SEE! Fatties can do shit! They’re more than just fat!! They get other adjectives!”

It made up for how it stung when he described Henry’s armour getting larger and larger and how everyone laughed.

“Oh, no, Henry was very athletic, he wasn’t as fast in a foot race but he was very athletic.”
How brilliant. I love that sentence – I wish my history teacher had come up with things like that. She was a bit odd and tended to randomly invent things. “Louis Pasteur pioneered the use of Spaghetti in the vain hope it would cure his wife’s frigidity” kind of thing. Funny right up to the bit where we all seriously shitted our history exams up with crap information.
Never mind. By the way, mentioning Gregory Hines reminded of how cool that man was. I don’t know if anyone saw the film “White Nights” but he even managed to be cool in that – no small task.

I’m going to be in Seattle the weekend of Emerald City Comicon, which Kate Beaton is attending and, even though being surrounded by strangers completely freaks me out and otherwise I have no reason at all to attend a comic convention, I kinda want to go so I can stare at her from across the room and try to work up my courage to exchange a few awkward sentences with her while I purchase something.

My other plan was to loiter outside the convention center and hope she goes out for lunch or something, but the SO seems less than thrilled with that idea.

I too had a crazy high school history teacher who had a habit of wandering out of the classroom mid-sentence, mixing up names, making up information, and asking us what we knew about some minor figure who was mentioned briefly in the reading and then responding to our blank looks with “Well if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you!” She was a legend at my high school. There is a facebook group dedicated to her greatness.

Paintmonkey, if for any reason you lurrrve Malaysian food (oh nom nom nom), there is a special offer on in Londontown by the Malaysian Tourist board where they are doing 2-for-1 dealshttp://www.malaysiakitchen.co.uk/ (follow the Metro link)
I went to Sedap and I could have drunk the curry sauces they were sooooo good!

I love the everloving crap out of Kate Beaton. She recently tweeted some old history notes/comics she had, reminding me of my own tendency to stage little conversations between countries as a method of studying.

“So then Germany’s all, ‘we will conquer you!’ and Austria and Poland and everyone are like ‘help! help!’ And the US is like ‘doot de doo, I’m just hanging out,’ until the Lusitania is like ‘aieeee!’ and then they’re like ‘Now just a durn minute here…!'”

Hipster Puppies are awesome. So is the man your man could smell like, which my mom emailed to me last week. I hate it when my mom knows about cool internet shit before me…

On the topic of puppies, while driving into town today I saw a BASSET HOUND PUPPY. It was so cute with its oversized ears and undersized body, I just wanted to snorgle it. I wish I had taken a picture, its ears were about 3/4 its body size, ADORABLE.

Hipster puppies are hilarious, baby clouded leopards own my soul, I visit disapproving rabbits every day, and I want to congratulate whomever it was that came up with selleckwaterfallsandwich.

By the way, for all you Shapelings who are in New York City, the New York Historical Society is FREE until the 21st of February, and my husband and I went there yesterday to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. There’s an enormous, fascinating exhibit about Abraham Lincoln and his relationship with New York that I really enjoyed. It gives many different perspectives, in particular the perspectives of African Americans and immigrant groups at the time, so there’s a lot to learn that your formal education may have glossed over. I was shocked to learn about the overall negative attitude New Yorkers had about Lincoln, and specifically emancipation; the pitting of poor whites and new immigrants from Europe against black people, and the resulting draft riots in Manhattan are explored in depth in this exhibit.

AND upstairs there’s an exhibit of the letters of abolitionist John Brown, eighteenth century portraiture, and paintings from the Hudson River School. Loads of things to see, hours of learning. And it’s FREE!

I had an interesting ‘diets don’t work’ discovery this week that I would like to share. About a month ago I got this device that you wear on your arm to measure calories spent and activity level. Now, many people use these as a weight loss tool, but I got it because my metabolism has always been a mystery and I thought it would be really neat to find out how much energy I really do expend.

It also has features to track exercise duration and sleep duration. I like to keep a certain fitness level because it makes my activity of choice (biking) so much more fun and I have always had problems with insomnia so activity and sleep info is very useful.

All of this is to say that while some use it as a diet tool, I don’t, so I hope it’s OK to talk about it here.

So, the discovery. Since I have been using this thing I have seen that my daily sedentary run rate is pretty consistent from day to day (I don’t know if I should say a number here because that might not be cool wrt the posting rules). If I do an activity I burn more during the activity but then settle back to the normal rate quickly afterward.

The other night I did a fairly big bike ride – about 2.5 hours long with a climb to the top of a smallish mountain. For whatever reason I didn’t really get hungry on the ride and didn’t eat anything, but by the time I finished I was starving. I ate as much as I could before going to bed but woke up painfully ravenous the next day, which has always been a signal to me that I didn’t adequately replenish during and after the ride. I ate a normal breakfast and kept eating whenever I got hungry for the rest of the day – but here’s the fascinating bit. My run rate went DOWN!!! I know it’s only one day’s worth of data from one person, but I thought it was very telling that EVEN AFTER STRENUOUS EXERCISE, when I (accidentally and briefly) put my body into starvation mode, it promptly slowed itself down! I know this will not be surprising to Shapelings, but I did want to share that I have a small amount of actual scientific evidence that calories in/calories out is SO much more complex that people want to believe.

@Krishji – I live in Cobble Hill. I grew up in Western NY. I shall never ever be hip enough for my neighborhood. The babies are more stylish than I can even dream. Although I suspect the oodles of disposable income has more to do with it than any sort of innate coolness. As I am constantly telling myself, I don’t even CARE about being cool, so I win! Take that, babies! And thanks for the Historical Society tip! Mr.Luci has SAD like whoa this winter; perhaps this will get him out of the house this weekend!

Also, PUPPIES MAKE MY HEART ACHE. I miss puppy smell!

That Old Spice commercial completely knocked me and Mr.Luci on our respective asses. The Olympics (skating!) have meant that tv is actually on in the apartment instead of the usual constant stream of movies and tv shows on dvd, so I haven’t really seen commercials for a long time. So I was really not expecting to laugh my ass off at an Old Spice commercial, but OMG! It was like the perfect antidote to the horrid Superbowl commercial misogyny-fest.

I went to the nashville zoo yesterday, but the lemurs (nor the giraffes!) weren’t out because it was too cold. I though of Shapely Prose the who time I was there, though. We did see tigers, clouded leopards, elephants, and all kinds of other stuff.

Jenniferal, the glasses baffle me too, especially since it’s really only been the last 5-ish years that glasses have been sort of default hip/intellectual rather than nerdy/intellectual. I love my glasses (which have come a loooooong way since my third-grade monstrosities that took up my whole face), but I was one of the only people I knew choosing glasses over contacts for years.

I went to San Diego Zoo in January to visit the baby panda who was born in August. I saw him* sleeping in a tree near his mother and then I got back in the queue and when I got back in I saw him being breastfeed. Sooo cute! Sometimes you can check him out on Pandacam: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/pandacam/

By definition a hipster conforms to a status group with transitory interests (the point being that their tastes are determined solely by consensus within the group). So if you find that something you like is hip, just stick with it and soon enough it’ll be passe. I’ve been wearing aloha shorts since the early nineties, I guess, and I think I’ve been hip about three times now (once for only three days, which I still think counts).

@ lucizoe – Oh, Cobble Hill! I heart the movie theatre there, and Pacific Green grocery store! I lived a brief time in neighboring Boerum Hill (Pacific Street), before I had enough and went back home to Harlem. I know those babies with the checkered Vans and the mohawk haircuts. I don’t blame the kids; I blame their huge, SUV strollers that don’t belong on an old, narrow sidewalk. It’s most totes about the money rather than the innate coolness. Definitely take your husband to the New York Historical Society – there’s just so much to see and do, you forget about the miles of grey slush outside. And, as I am a friendly New Yorker who’s been around, as is my own husband, we’re always up for double dates, in Brooklyn OR Manhattan. I love my city :)

@ Grafton – to add to what Chris Gregory said about what a hipster is, I’d like to say that I think of hipsters as people that are 1) happy to move into a neighborhood for a short time because it is “trendy,” not contribute or integrate socially into the existing community, take up space, make noise, and then leave a pile of stink in their wake; 2) people with certain levels of privilege, especially economic, that like to appropriate elements of other cultures (working class culture especially) in an “ironic” way because they find it amusing, without bothering to learn anything about the individuals who actually belong to that culture. As an individual who is deeply invested in the health and vibrancy of my own neighborhood, hipsters really irritate me: it’s not the PBR swilling, or the tight, bright colored pants as much as it is the self-involved attitude. Grafton, you could get black eyeglasses tattooed on your face and you wouldn’t be a hipster.

Ironic consumption…when I was a young man, you would wear a Motorhead t-shirt because you liked Motorhead. Nowadays, I see young men wearing Motorhead t-shirts and I know that they don’t actually listen to Motorhead. They just like the image because it’s cool. Now, I guess it’s funny if they’re aware of the irony, but there’s something sad about it, and part of it has to do with the way that almost all the old forms of teenage expression have been commercialised and commodified.

(oops, and my partner just pointed out that I wrote aloha shorts. I meant shirts. Shirts.)

Yeah see this is just creepy to me. I didn’t mention this on the Facebook doppelganger thread because it wasn’t really relevant to any of Mean Asian Girl’s points, but my sister put down Joseph Gordon-Levitt as her doppelganger. And it is SPOT. ON.

It seems inevitable that I’ll accidentally be hip at some point. Actually, I may have developed this fear from a time when I picked a few t-shirts out of a dumpster and it turned out that some which I thought were just kinda funny were band-shirts for ska bands, which resulted in several horrible encounters in which I had to explain that I did not like the band so far as I knew, had never heard it, did not wish to since I didn’t like ska as a general thing.

Krishji’s hipster definition reminds me of ‘freegans’ from the days when the reason I wasn’t homeless was that I didn’t buy food but got it out of dumpsters. They did the same thing, but didn’t need to, thought doing it made them morally superior, were noisy about it and caused a lot of places to lock the dumpsters, wore really expensive sandals and had complete fucking semi-violent hissyfits about what a disgusting evil person I am when they discovered that my diet also included pigeons.

I kind of want to start wearing glasses, even though my vision is beyond perfect. It’s pluperfect, if you could call it that. (Seriously, I went to get my eyes tested and the doctor was like, “Your vision’s not 20/20, but… well, cats have the same type of vision as you, let’s put it that way.”) But my friend who wears glasses out of necessity says that she will instantly lose respect for me if I become “one of those people who wears glasses for cosmetic reasons but doesn’t really need them.” And the worst part is, if I were to wear glasses, I would want to wear a giant pair of black or tortoise browline or horn-rimmed glasses, which I suppose would not only make me “one of those people,” but “one of those people” who is also a HIPSTER. The humanity.

Glasses are for the visually-impaired or for eye safety, so wearing them without needing them is an ironic use. A tie is just an ornamental or a formal thing (although it is kind of a displaced phallic symbol, I guess), so it’s kind of different. I’m pretty blind without glasses, so I’ve worn them since I was a kid, and while I don’t hate them it’s odd that someone would choose to wear them. I don’t think it really matters, but I guess it’d offend some people’s sense of propriety…I think wearing clothes that poor people wear ironically is offensive in lots of ways – the whole being so rich you can choose to dress like you’re homeless thing – but wearing glasses? It would depend on the glasses, I suspect, whether they were ironically ugly or not. If they just look nice, and frame your face in a positive way, why not? If they’re lightly tinted, then they’re classed as sunglasses, and have a definite use-value.

I used to have a friend who was semi-famous for having Michael Hutchence portray a character based on him in the movie Dogs in Space. For a while he was walking around with a cane, just as an affectation. When I saw him in public I’d always ask him, quite loudly, what was wrong with his leg and could he tell me what had he done to his leg, to draw attention to the fact that the cane was just a prop. After I did this a few times he stopped using the cane.

Hmm. That too seems harsh. There’s a long history of walking sticks as an accessory to men’s formal attire — they came in when wearing a sword went out. Which is why you can rent one to go along with your white tie (tails) formal wear. I suppose adopting old-fashioned fashions is an affectation, but I’d say that strutting around with a walking-stick is appropriating an element of Victorian culture, not one from modern disability-culture.

@Chris Gregory, thank you. I first began to need canes it was during a brief period of hipster fashion, and since mine were pretty it was often assumed I had it just for show. It was … irksome. I picked up an ugly aluminum one and used that for awhile, just to avoid that shit. Fortunately, hipster fashions seem to usually only last long enough to sneeze twice, so soon enough I could use the ones I liked.

As an aside, these are the same kind of folks my parents – who were/are counterculture but starting in the 50s – knew as ‘weekenders.’ Because they didn’t live the life, they were just tourists. I’ve been thinking about this, because the whole Evelyn Evelyn thing … it occurred to me this evening, they’re tourists of disability. It’s like, just another country seen through the window of a bus, to them.

@ Grafton – You’ve nailed it on the head with your analogy, we are in utter and complete agreement. And, God and god and FSM forbid you find yourself hungry in New York, I’ll cook for you. And the androgyny of most of the hipsters on latfh.com is “ironic”, but that doesn’t also not make it trans unsafe.

@ Lucy – The eyeglasses you would choose to wear (if you needed them) don’t make you a hipster, because you actually LIKE them, and you are also a considerate person. Exonerated!

@ Eucritta – I like your idea of “disability tourists.” I am sorry you had to put up with such irritation during the cane fad.

Re: eyeglasses – I am a real eyeglass wearer, and I’ll tell you, as someone with a v. v. high prescription (20/1200 – yeah it exists!), wearing glasses is not fun. They are heavy, uncomfortable, slip down my greasy nose, fog up, fall off my face when I run for the bus, get dirty every ten minutes, and make the world look small and flat, and I have no peripheral vision. Contact lenses for me. Glasses are miserable, miserable things and I hate them, no matter how attractive or fashionable they might be. Y-U-C-K.

@ The Other Caitlin – Oh, no, please don’t misunderstand, I think Cobble Hill is a great place, and interesting and appealing in many ways. Don’t let my bitterness about having my good time in Bklyn spoiled by a few (very few) crummy people confuse you.

Got it! I kinda got the impression North Brooklyn was more hipsterville than South Brooklyn. We’ve got plenty of hipsters in San Francisco too and they like to hang out in some of my favourite areas. And I like some of the same things they do. And I could relate to the hipster puppy who bought the banjo at the estate sale and still had it in its hallway – I do shit like that! I don’t think I am actually a hipster though – I’ve never really been cool.

Perhaps ironically, I subsequently injured my back. While a cane might help me in the short-term, my situation is such that it’s better for me not to rely on one. I’m very limited – I can’t queue in a supermarket, for example, but it’s not a conspicuous thing. So you hear somethings sometimes…there’s a woman we see regularly who jumps down people’s throats for using the word ‘gay’ to describe something, but she says things are ‘lame’ all the time. I mean to stop her the next time she tells someone off.

@Grafton, eh, it’s okay. I wouldn’t even mind the fad – which seems to be on again, at least among steampunks – if folks would use their brains. It’s not like a classic walking-stick even looks like a proper cane, much of the time: they’re too lightweight. Or in the case of hiking sticks, way way too long.

I have lovely canes. The one I use most is a richly-grained wood – a kind of heat-treated plywood, and very tough – with fish-shaped handle (it looks like a carp to me) and a gilded band.

Krishji — Thanks. I am happy to say that every day I entrench myself a little further into the paradise of food security. Now I tend to buy the expensive organic and fair-trade stuff, hoping that means that the people who grow my food are food-secure too.

But if you want to contact me on the ning we could meet for a meal when I come to New York in October.

http://www.foodforkidsbackpackprogram.com/index.html is cool, if folks want to help people who are living near me and in my former situation of choosing rent before food (which, really, considering the horrors of shelter-life, is very wise). They’re not feeding people without kids, but I like their approach that naturally the whole family ought to eat, and the rolling bag on the school-bus thing is a nice solution to the timing and transportation problems one encounters when trying to use food banks.

Eucritta — Thanks. And good, re: pretty canes. My favourite one is carved to look like a snake, with the ‘scales’ burned in (probably with a thin wire) and coloured stripes drawn on it with, of all things, hi-lighter pens. A friend of mine bought it at a street-market in Mexico. But except for the time when I actually needed it because I’d hurt my knee, I find I don’t know what to do with a cane after a little bit.

@ Grafton – It would be my greatest pleasure to entertain you while you are in New York come the fall! However (shrinks with embarassment) I don’t know how to use the ning – have tried! Have failed. ::foolish blushing:: And the food for kids backpack program sounds really excellent – is it Denver only? I volunteer at Jackie Robinson Park swimming pool in the summer for the summer meals for kids – free for anyone 18 and younger, no signing up necessary, and they get so much delicious food, mostly because the packers know that the kids share with parents and grandparents. Clever, isn’t it?

I’ve noticed people wearing glasses when they don’t need to a lot lately as well. An extended family member got glasses and wears them every now and then for reasons unknown. This is in a family where I ask “what do you wear them for, distance or reading?” and they don’t seem to realize there is a difference. But if you’re just wearing some non-prescription frames I say go for it. It just perturbs me when people only where them for this or that, but not all the time, and don’t seem to know what they need them for. Then it DOES become an affectation that you use only when it’s convenient rather than a necessity or a style. I wore contacts for a few years and switched back to glasses; partly because I was having a lot of bad contact days, partly because the contacts seemed to bother my husband (every time I complained he’d suggest I needed to go back to glasses, maybe he thinks they make me more attractive) and partly because in my technical line of work I have DEFINITELY noticed a different in how people treat me when I started wearing them again. They are not the hipster style or the tina fey style, but I’ll take any advantage I can to overcome uh other physical appearance issues I have where people assume I’m stupid.

The food backpack thing just started a little under a year ago. I know one of the founders. She found out that some of the kids were throwing sports games or letting other kids cheat off them, stuff like that, in trade for those kid’s lunches so they could take bag lunches home for their families to have for supper. So she and another lady made this program. I know they want to expand to more schools.

I’m not usually a big fan of “children’s charities” because they imply that adults are less valuable (I joke around about how actually, fetuses are the most valuable, and devalue at birth, depreciating so they become completely worthless at eighteen) and that children somehow exist in a vacuum and can be okay when their parents are not. It’s nice to know that there’s more than one that’s accommodating and encouraging sharing.

@Grafton I am really impressed that you ate pigeons. And I’m a vegetarian. I’m not categorically opposed to the eating of animals though, I’m opposed to forcing animals into a short and miserable life just to make the harvesting of their meat more efficient.

@Grafton, how did you catch them…? My cats can’t catch birds for fuck’s sake. (Fun aside, lately we’ve been feeding a squirrel and he has taken to grabbing our screen door and shaking it when there’s no food on the porch for him. My cats are terrified of him, he stares at them nose to nose through the glass door.)

Re: Backpack food for kids. We have a similiar program here in my city called backpack buddies. One of my students in my observation class used it, I was pleased to see that they really fill those backpacks. The teacher majorly failed though because you aren’t supposed to tell the other students about it to keep it from embarassing them. She, of course, did tell. I was not a big fan of hers.

I had major flashbacks to my terrible grade school education in that classroom. I was trying to help one boy with his math, they were supposed to draw circles to help with their addition and write a number sentence. His number sentence was really off, as I sat down to help him she walked past and said in a normal speaking voice “He’s just not good at math.” Turns out he was just focusing too much on the drawings and making them too complicated. All it took was me saying “Draw 7 circles. Draw 8 circles. How many do you have?” He came up with 15 right away.

This may need some sort of Not Trans Safe label, because of all the mockery of androgyny/cross-dressing. Unless these hipsters are ‘ironically’ appropriating that, too. I’m puzzled.

Oh, I’m sorry I put that link up without any kind of warning — I have such a hard time parsing the hipster aesthetic shown there that I sort of have a blanket Befuddlement Warning in my head about that site, which I forgot to mention.

RE: Baby LeopardsThis photo shows one of the leopard cubs looking chubby. Adorably so, I might add, and in my opinion just right for a leopard of that age — brain development and all — but Michelle Obama might want to warn the National Zoo of the dangers of childhood leopard obesity. Bad example, you know.

I must change my icon photo. My hair is not always that frizzy. But, if you are walking behind someone about five feet tall, around a size 18, with hair that looks like that and you are in the Puget Sound region, you could tap the woman on the shoulder and ask, “Are you Kate Harding?” If it’s me, I’ll say, “why yes, are you?”

About children’s charities: I think that it’s easier for them to get support, for the exact “depreciation” theory that you suggest, but the people who work in the charities know fair well that hungry children depend on hungry adults.

@ alibelle – What an awful teacher! I… wow. I just don’t understand why people with those sorts of attitudes even want to be teachers in the first place.

You find where they sleep. Usually in or on a building, and you can get the church minister or building manager to not only let you in but pay you to remove pigeons. (It is probably not a good idea to tell that person that you eat them.) Climb up to the rafters where they sleep, in the dark, and pick them up gently and put them in a bag. Fabric, so they don’t suffocate, and not so many per bag that they’re all on top of each other. Fold your hands over their wings as you pick them up so they don’t flap and wake up the next one over and cause a panic. If they all freak out you can turn on a lantern so they can see to get back to their perches, turn it off when they do and wait a little so they all fall asleep again.

Squirrels are really good and if you see one get hit by a car you eat it, but never ever ever try to catch one. Urban squirrels and rabbits are naive and will get close enough you can just jump on them, but the rabbits are easy to kill quick while squirrels are ridiculously strong and will hurt you.

Ooh, and I had a Major Shopping Success today! Whenever I need new bras, I always check Roses (the discount chain — dunno if they still exist outside NC) first. I found a 36E for under $10. This made me Very Happy.

OMG, I’m going to the Monterey Aquarium in a few weeks. I can’t wait to see the otter baby!
I’m sending the hipster puppies link to my dog-loving friend who laughs at my obsession with LOLcats. Revenge is mine……

This is pretty dry, and I’m not sure the conclusions are true; but I got to the last sentence:

“It must be made clear to drivers that there are also risks involved with taking familiar and seemingly harmless routes. The risks groups, i.e. young professionals, especially bakers, are to be specifically targeted.”

@ Piffle – Why bakers indeed. I have put a bit of thought to this and have come up with my own ideas:
1) Bakers often go to work very early in the morning when it is still dark outside. If they aren’t alert and are driving in the dark, that perhaps will further increase the likelihood for an accident.
2) Bakers bake delicious baked goods. They must be protected!

They fail to support their conclusion in any way. That’s just weird. Have they any evidence that people actually have a higher rate of accidents on familiar routes than on novel ones? Obviously the popular wisdom about most auto accidents happening on familiar routes is skewed by the fact that most people don’t drive novel routes nearly as often as familiar ones. Kind of like most accidents happening at home. It’s not because home is less safe, it’s because people can’t manage to have accidents somewhere where they are not, and home is where many people very often are.

All the professional bakers I have known smoke a lot of weed, and I suppose that might make them a high-risk group for driving.

OK, totally off topic but it’s driving me crazy looking for it. There was a post recently that I *thought* was here at SP, and that I *thought* was written by Sweet Machine (but which in reality may have been someplace and by someone completely different, explaining why I cannot find it!). The writer described seeing two elderly women engaging in diet talk and discussed this as an example of cultural scripts; the writer also made a comment to the effect of, these ladies are in their 80s, can’t they eat what they want yet? Where is this post? Am I crazy? Does anyone else remember it? Was it here…. or somewhere else entirely?

Because Hipster Pups, cute though they be, are not scratching this itch for me today!

I’ve been in Israel since last Wednesday and having an absolute blast. Today, I went to the Dead Sea, met a Bedouin and rode on a camel. Not too shabby! I will share my camel photos when I have a chance, if anyone wants to see them.

My brother is getting maaaaaarrrrrrried, and his fiancee has asked me to be one of her upstandings at the wedding. At the moment, we’re being asked to find a little black dress, any kind we like.

The bride’s dress is a very pretty white, very full, 1950’s cut v-necked short sleeved floofy petticoat number.

If you know where an in-betweenie could go to get a dress in black that looks like it walked off the same movie set as the bride’s dress, please do feel free to drop me a note on my blog or here. I wear a 16/18. You know. Usually at the top end of straight sizes and just this side of too small for plus sizes.

I don’t mind spending a couple hundred on a nice dress that I really, actually will wear again, and would prefer sleeves over just a dress with straps. And I would really, really prefer natural fabrics. The wedding will be outside in May.

I was cruising around Etsy and was getting overwhelmed by the number of places a person can look and the hit or miss quality of searching for things, and Macy’s and Nordstroms made me *wah*.
Thanks, SP-ers, for any suggestions you can offer.

Best pigeon-hunting experience was when I saw a falcon come down and tear a couple of feathers off a pigeon. Pigeon reversed direction and dove into a bush. I crawled into the bush and poked the pigeon with my finger. Guess I was rooting for the falcon. But the pigeon just gave me this “oh, holy fuck, no way” look and I left her alone after that, because. Well, you gotta respect a badass. The falcon circled around above the bush for a while and was very pretty.

AliciaMaud74, thanks so much for these links. I’ve bookmarked them for further contemplation- some of those things might work really well.

I think jersey may be a bit too informal, but I am going back for that sailor dress some other time for any good reason I can justify.

In the meantime, I LOVE this model’s pizazz, AND I love the cut of the dress. I am, perhaps a bit too wedge-shaped (broad shoulders, big bust, narrow hips, evident tummy roll) for this curvaceous-loving cut. But boy, oh boy, do I love the creative and interesting style of the dress!

OMG, I totally love that one. She had a sample of that for 1/2 price a few months ago but in the wrong size for me. Sigh. And her models are so great (as are Cupcake and Cuddlebunny’s) . Just another fyi, I think that the folks who do the jersey stuff also do their pieces in modal, which is definitely dressier…but I guess even that would depend on the venue and such. I have found the sellers on Etsy to be incredibly accomodating when doing custom clothes, and usually really knowledgeable about fit and what works for particular body shapes. Good luck!

I have deboned, cooked and eaten pigeon in a cooking class in London. The very posh instructor told us that this was an essential skill if any of us happened to have a friend whose husband shoots because we might be given a pheasant some day and the deboning method is the same. I found this hilarious – I don’t really move in circles where I’m likely to be given a pheasant in such circumstances. But the wood pigeon was yummy – I’m pretty sure we had it in a salad that also involved black pudding. I was far more squeamish about the black pudding but still ate it.

I think urban pigeons are bigger than wild wood pigeons. But urban pigeons are quite variable depending on the city. They are quite good. People say that squab (a not quite fledged young pigeon) is better because the grown ones taste somehow liver-y, but I’ve never thought so. It seems to me like people ought to set up little dovecotes for them so they can be caught easily, but I suppose you never know whose been trying to poison the pretty little things and eating free-flying ones is maybe a little risky.

I’m not sure if the ‘freegans’ were horrified by my pigeon-eating because they were vegetarians, or because pigeons are not considered proper animals to eat, or because it meant that I killed animals. People can be very funny about that and often seem to be proposing that it’s okay to eat meat but that people who kill animals for meat should be shunned untouchables or something. Or you get the converse, people who think that people who won’t kill an animal should not be allowed to eat one. Both views seem weird to me.

Eating pigeons is a lot like eating rats to most people. I couldn’t tell you offhand if eating an urban pigeon is risky (I’m mostly thinking trichinosis, which is not a good disease to catch), but pigeon is certainly available commercially, where it’s usually called squab (which I think is technically a bird slaughtered just before it’s old enough to fly, after which point it gets tougher and more gamey). If you want a recipe for pigeon, an older Joy of Cooking will have a few (my 1966 copy has a recipes for potted, broiled and roasted pigeon, with dressing suggestions). An even older Joy of Cooking (I think you can get a reproduction of the original thirties edition) should have more, as well as instructions for preparing squirrels and other game that was popular in austere times.

Wouldn’t get trichinosis from eating a bird, cooking kills the worms and cysts. Unless undercooked, and who eats raw or rare poultry? They often have feather-lice on them, but that’s no harm. I just wonder what contaminants might build up in them from chemical avicides and drinking from puddles on pavement and stuff.

@Grafton, if you mean that only hipsters use the ‘freegan’ identifier, then yes, but to me a freegan is anyone who integrates the procurement and use of free stuff into their daily lives and budget, either because they’re trying to live on less money or because they’re trying to use fewer resources. But yeah, if you just mean hipsters who think it’s ironically cool to wear a mechanic’s shirt they picked out of the trash … yeah … annoying.

Sadly, the advice for cooking things like squirrel have weathered the years better than the recipes for some of the more common ingredients. A modern pig has a half to a fifth of the fat of older breeds, so if you don’t adjust for leaner, drier meat, the recipes in pre-80’s cookbooks often won’t turn out as intended. If things keep up, you can pretty much say goodbye to anything that doesn’t taste just like chicken (in other words, bland and lean fast-twitch white muscle tissue).

Much of what differentiates the flavour of one meat from another is the fat. The problem is that people are willing to substitute good, tasty foods with leaner, less tasty replacements. And you end up with something that doesn’t satisfy in any sense. At least with squirrel (or pigeon) you’re going to remember the experience.

Squirrels are pretty lean. Suburban squirrel is better than downtown-park squirrel. They get all fat and delicious from eating sunflower seeds out of bird feeders. Aargh. Now I want one. Well, except that I think I’d have better luck trying to hand-catch a badger, and come out of the experience with fewer injuries.

My mother has a hilarious cookery book from the late 50’s, and one of the recipes is called “Television Tea-Tray Treat”. Get this – the recipe is exactly the same as a normal one except that you “present it to your husband” on a tray in front of the television. The novelty!! I imagine this wouldnt hold quite the same thrill nowadays…well, not in my house anyway.In the book, there is even a photo of a slick haired man in a suit laughing at the exotica of eating his meal from a tray balanced on his knees. His wife is stood to his side looking immaculate and laughing along at the sheer excitement of tea tray dining.
My Grandma when I was a kid called this “KneesyTeasys” as though eating from a tea-tray balanced on your knee was reason enough to send an excited commemorative postcard to a loved one.

Chris Gregory–
The first time I had Real Bacon was a revelation to me. But I had to get it by purchasing a half-pig from a pig herd. (The purchase included the cost of having the pig butchered, etc, of course.) I believe it averaged into about $2.50 a pound. So worth it, if you live in an area where local farmers keep a few pigs. I know, it’s totally anti-Charlotte’s-Web, but it is at least a good idea from the animal welfare point of view as well as the really yummy food point of view.

I usually buy about seven or eight kilograms of pork belly at a time (let’s say seventeen pounds), about four foot-long squares of the stuff, to make enough bacon to last us, well, seemingly no time at all. I buy it at a butcher. What’s a butcher, you ask?

I grew up in the country in the south-eastern bit of Australia, and spent part of that time living on a farm. Agriculture in Australia is a lot like agriculture was in the US thirty or so years ago: a lot less industrialised. There’s a lot of room and the soil isn’t very rich, so intensive farming methods aren’t used much at all. The cows eat grass, not grain, their whole lives, and aren’t fattened at a feedlot. They used to say that we lived off the sheep’s back: wool and lamb were our main exports for a long time. We’re not so big on pigs, but I think they’re getting better with the growing Chinese population. I live in a mostly Muslim area of Melbourne, and lamb from a halal butcher is particularly first rate.

We have butchers on almost every corner, who get primals (large chunks of meat, basically) delivered, which they hang in the shop (which ages them), and which they prepare themselves into sausages and steak and whatnot. I think many people buy meat at the supermarket, for the convenience, but I think the local butchers are actually doing a little more business these days. I’m happy to go to my local butcher for mince to make rare burgers, for example, knowing that he’ll grind it up right then and there. Buying mince in a supermarket: who knows how long it’s been there and who made it?